Expense Report Confidential: How Much Do You Spend on Dinner On The Road?

The three-martini lunch may not be in favor, but travelers sure seem to be dining well when on the road, at least according to their expense accounts.

This week’s Middle Seat offers an Expense Report Confidential -– a true picture of what we spend when we travel. Expense-management company Concur Technologies Inc., for the first time, crunched more than 8 million expense reports from thousands of clients at the request of The Middle Seat, and the results are quite revealing. The story includes loads of data, so if you want to know what others are expensing for the average dinner in San Francisco or the average cab ride in Atlanta, now you can look it up.

The average tab for a meal worldwide was a hearty $39 while dining alone during travel on corporate expense accounts. That sounds like a pretty tasty meal most of the time, though that’s probably about the minimum for a room-service breakfast at a nice hotel.

Food turns out to be a very big expense for travelers, though we often focus far more on airline and hotel expenses. Dining makes up nearly 10% of the average expense account, and “entertainment’’ -– usually group meals -– adds another 5%.

Business travelers spend more on cabs than they do on car rentals. Ground transportation costs add up to about 5% of the average expense account, while car rentals amount to about 3% worldwide (4% in U.S. expense accounts). More car rentals in Rome would surely skew the averages: The average car rental entry from trips to Rome was $440, Concur said, which was the highest among major cities around the world.

The most expensive cab fares? Toronto was tops internationally at $66. But in the U.S., San Jose, Calif., at an average $47 for ground transportation in expense reports and Atlanta at $46, were highest among the 25 most frequently visited business-travel cities based on the number of hotel room night stays.

Overall, New York generates the most travel and entertainment expense reports, and is also the most expensive. The average hotel room rate in New York was $198, well ahead of No. 2 Washington, D.C., at $173. The average dining ticket in New York was $68, Concur said. That’s far more than something off the food bar in a bodega.

The story also shows how it’s getting harder to fudge on expense accounts, and how companies like Concur are trying to more carefully track all the many fees that airlines have begun imposing in the past three years. Before you fill out your next expense account, you might want to check it out.

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About The Middle Seat Terminal

Scott McCartney writes The Middle Seat every Thursday. The Wall Street Journal’s Travel Editor, Scott has been on the airline beat since 1995 — long enough to see it go from bust to boom and back to bust. He also writes a blog on travel at The Middle Seat Terminal.

Scott won the Online News Association award for online commentary in 2003 for “The Middle Seat,” the George Polk Award for transportation reporting in 2000, and has been honored by the Deadline Club and New York’s chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Before joining the Journal in 1993, he spent 11 years at The Associated Press.

Scott, a native of Boston and graduate of Duke University, is the author of four books, includingThe Wall Street Journal Guide to Power Travel: How to Arrive with Your Dignity, Sanity, and Wallet Intact, which was published in 2009. He’s also an instrument-rated private pilot.